Since John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain invented the world's first transistor in 1947, inorganic field-effect transistors (FETs) have dominated the mainstream microelectronics industry. They are the fundamental building blocks for basic analytical circuits, such as amplifiers, as well as the key elements for digital combinational logic circuits, such as adders, shifters, inverters, and arithmetic logic units, and are used to build sequential logic circuits, such as flip-flops. Moreover, transistors are essential to the modern memory devices, integrated circuits, and microprocessors used in personal computers and laptops.
